Career Construction Theory and Personality

I’m working on a project which will attempt to delineate the key stages of career development during childhood using the lens of Career Construction Theory (CCT), and while I won’t go into the specifics in this article I thought it was worth spending some time on a side issue which came out of my recent reading.

To give some context, CCT basically builds on constructivism which suggests that meaning is something we create – there is no inherent meaning to anything, other than what we assign. This means that your career isn’t an actual concrete ‘thing’, it’s just a series of jobs, educational experiences, and other activities and moments that we string together into a career story.

Part of the process of constructing our career story is defining our character role – who are we, what do we stand for, and what are our traits?

We need this character in order to start our story, and while it’s ok for there to be an element of character development, there is an expectation that the fundamentals of the character will remain pretty much the same. Unless you’re recreating Primal Fear (please don’t), you shouldn’t expect a major personality shift to take place during the story; instead, character development should take the form of gradual change in response to obstacles that may or may not lead to revelatory moments.

The concept of a stable, definable personality is pretty crucial to much of career development theory. When we are able to identify traits, then group them into clusters with other similar traits, it becomes easier to guide people towards roles where their traits are put to best use. A reliance on traits can be found throughout career development theory from it’s earliest days of Parson’s Trait and Factor Theory right through to our continued reliance on Holland Codes and RIASEC, which uses interests and traits to align people with one of six clusters.

So, if ‘personality’ is at the heart of what we do, then it’s pretty important that we explore what personality actually is.

What if we replace personality with reputation?

I’m not here to define ‘personality’ – to be honest, that’s way beyond my abilities.

The word personality has its origins in the latin persona, which literally translates to ‘mask’ or ‘character’. There are connections here to performance, how we choose to perform, yet we have come to believe that personality is something that is inherent, rather than something that has been created.

We diagnose specific personality disorders, as if the personality was as concrete as the blood, and the most important sign of a personality disorder is ‘strange or erratic behaviour’.

But if personality is not something inherent, if it is preordained and destined to be that way, then what is it?

Mark Savickas, the architect of CCT, suggests that it is our reputation, not our ‘personality’, which defines our traits (Savickas, 2020). Here’s how this works:

1. a child tries out skills, behaviours, opinions, habits, and ways of being
2. they receive feedback, both positive and negative, about the things they are trying
3. they refine their actions in response to the feedback, until their actions, beliefs, etc. become relatively consistent
4. once their ways of being have become consistent, then we consider these to be stable ‘traits’, and we say that they have developed their own personality
5. they choose to act as themselves in order to uphold how others think of them, to maintain their reputation

We actually choose to reinforce this from a child’s earliest days; how often have you heard “that’s not like you!” in response to an outburst or unusual choice? When someone chooses to radically change the way they act (mid-life crisis, anyone?), we say that they’ve had a mental health breakdown and intervene to bring them back to ‘normal’.

Children are forming their initial reputation from a very young age, and their actions and the feedback they receive reinforce their reputation, which will eventually evolve into their adult ‘personality’ and dictate the kinds of things they find interesting. The traits they develop will make it easier for us to categorise them and evaluate their skills in relation to others, so that we can guide them towards career pathways that suit the reputation they have created.

Do we need to rethink career guidance in light of this?

There’s a lot to unpack here, and I’ve only just begun to scratch the surface. Personality is not something that we normally mess with – we allow it to evolve organically – but should we pay more attention to this process? There are implications not just for career development but for every aspect of society.

Social engineering isn’t something to be entered into lightly, but if interventions are taking place which impact on the development of personality/reputation then it is essential that we consider all of the implications, not just those which are most obvious.

References

Savickas, M. L. (2020). Career construction theory and counselling model. In S. D. Brown & R. W. Lent (Eds.), Career Development and Counseling: Putting Theory and Research to Work. John Wiley & Sons.